Survival Actions: When to Hold 'em and When to Fold 'em (Patreon)

This one is a patron request (you too can request your articles with a message to me here), the request was for an article looking at survival actions, specifically when best to use them in order to manage your survival pool. So we're going to take a look at survival actions overall and their interactions with survival, Survival Limit and survival replenishment.

I'll break this into a selection of punchy one line titles which will try and surmise things, and then explain in more detail beneath each one.

1. Surge and Dash are strictly optional

Yes, I know, that sounds utterly insane. However, recently after a discussion on the Lantern's Reign discord, I decided to see how far I could get without innovating Paint/Inner Lantern and then even when forced to (eventually you run out of things in the deck) I would not use them. I can report that the Gold Smoke Knight died to a Surge/Dashless settlement, but certain fights took forever to complete and had smaller margins for success.

Still, I can say with confidence that these two survival actions are not as important as Encourage/Dodge and that the optimal innovation route is Symposium -> Drums -> Forbidden Dance -> then Paint/Dash.  Honestly what I missed most of all from not innovating Paint/Inner Lantern was early access to Sculpture, Shrine and Face Painting.

This runs contrary to all previous opinions I had, and it's pretty nuts, but just because you're shut out of drawing Paint or Inner Lantern does not mean you're doomed to failure. It's going to be harder, but it's winnable.

2. Dash: In terms of damage prevention, Dash > Dodge

Kiting is a term from MMOs where you pull a monster along without taking much damage from it. This can be used for "griefing" where you get a dangerous mob (aggressive NPC) to a place it's not supposed to be, where it will cause mayhem. In Kingdom Death kiting is the use of the Dash during the monster's flow step in order to move outside of its range. This is very dependent on the movement statistic of both the survivor and the monster, these values can be adjusted via the use of items (Hollowpoint Arrow, Gorment Armor), rare stat increases and fighting arts (Harvestman).  You cannot kite The Hand or a Sunstalker as they are too fast, and the Dung Beetle Knight becomes less and less kitable as you go up in levels.

One of the simplest ways to experience this is with an early Gorment Armor set:

As you can see here, the body piece for this armor set gives you the Guard ability, which lets you attack and then move 3 spaces away. When you combine this with the gloves, the survival cost of this ability becomes 0.  

So, for example, if you are fighting a White Lion or The Butcher; both monsters that typically targets the closest threat in the front facing. You could attack on your turn, then Guard - placing you at a range of 3 spaces away from the monster. Then, when the monster then attacks you with a traditional attack, you will have a flow step where you can Dash and move another 5 spaces. You are now 8 spaces away from the monster, and if it has a movement of under 7 then when it attempts to get its target (you), it will move after you and do nothing else because you are not in range.

Combined with the Harvestman Fighting Art (which sets your base movement to 8) you now can avoid attacks from any monster with 9 movement or less for a single survival. This is far more powerful than Dodge or Block could ever be because even an attack that has 10 speed will do nothing if the monster can't reach its target.

Currently the best form of kiting I've managed is Dancer Armor (free movement after attacking) plus Harvestman, which gives a total of 16 squares of movement to play with for the kite action and 8 spaces of movement for attacking.

3. Surge: In dangerous fights, Surge is your best way out

Surge is easily the most powerful of the survival actions, because an activation is the most versatile of things you can get to spend. Activations can be spent for a whole host of different effects, from Block to AI Manipulation to removing Bleed Tokens - Activations do it all.

They also double the potency of what you do when you are attacking, which is one of the primary ways you are going to shorten a monster's life span. You might find my wording there a little cumbersome, and it is, but it's because surge doesn't just double your attacks, it can double the amount of times you activate Blood Paint.

4. Blood Paint: Superior Surge for Attackers

One way of reducing the amount of survival you need to spend on surge is via the best Antelope gear card - Blood Paint. Because it can activate two one handed weapons at the same time, it can be used by offensive characters in a far more effective manner than Paired ever will. There are some limitations and issues, mostly because of how the duplicate weapon rule works (which is honestly stupid design). So you have to use two different weapons if you want to get the greatest benefits, but it is worth this work around.

5. Encourage: You can do this at (almost) any time!

You get Encourage from the very start, and it's an unusual survival action because it is not bound by the limitations that Dodge, Surge and Dash are. It is allowed to be used at 'anytime'. Now, strictly speaking this is not at absolutely any time, if you draw a card that dooms (trap, King's Man coup de grâce), then the doomed text will take priority and you cannot do anything at all. But otherwise you're very free with when you can use this.

An example is, if an AI card would target a knocked down survivor (like White Lion ones), you can stand up the survivor before the targeting resolves and then it will target someone else. As long as you're not doing it in the middle of a sentence, it's fair game to use.

6. Endure: 1.5's Oddity

Endure turns up in 1.5 and it provides the ability to spend survival to 'not die'. There's not much to note here, you use it when you want to avoid dying and it makes the Death Mask turn from an item that increases your chance to die into one that helps keep you alive. This is because Endure costs 7 survival, minus your luck, so at a base level, Endure costs 3 survival and if you can stack luck up further, for example with the Sleeping Virus Flower and other (rare) ways of finding luck, you can even get that survival cost down to 0 - which will cancel all severe injuries, forever (unless you are doomed).

7. People of the Sun: Embolden, Overcharge and Limited Access to Surge

You might think that in People of the Sun, not having Surge is going to harm your experiences. Now there is no doubt that it makes certain things more difficult, I still dread facing Spidicules at higher levels because that fight can be a complete slog if you are trying to 'ball' it. But the combination of Embolden and Overcharge provides access to Devastating 1, which is like a more limited version of Surge. In essence, People of the Sun use their survival actions to hit harder and burst monsters down.

With this change, you should be looking to use higher speed weapons than normal (2-4) if you can, and also aim for them to be as accurate as possible, with high strength. This will allow you to secure hits and convert them into double wounds, which will reduce the monster's lifespan a lot faster.

It's not good if you're crit farming for resources, but it does allow you to burst through the harder monsters before their offense can overwhelm your defense.

So, all of this written, when do you use survival actions? Well there is no specific set of rules, it depends very much on your settlement's Survival limit (total and departing gains), survival sustain (rawhide for example) and the exact situation you are in. Now, as mentioned above, it's a no-brainer to Dash if you can Kite, because not being in range of an attack is the best form of damage mitigation you can achieve. But otherwise you'll need to decide on what works for your play style.  

I can say that if you are using slow, devastating weapons then surging becomes more powerful than if you are using spammy high speed ones, because the power of 2 hits potentially causing 4 wounds is far more than 6 hits that can potentially cause 6 wounds. This is because of the design of monster reactions, it's safer when you are doing heavy offense to deliver a few hugely damaging hits over lots of little ones. This is not just because of the trap, reactions are the main killer of offensive survivors, they wear the DPS survivor's armor down until the trap represents lethal.

I can also say that if you use a dedicated 'support' survivor (see here), then they should be using full Rawhide and taking advantage of Surge as often as possible. The doubling in activations is great for using a combination of the rawhide headband and cat's eye circlet/necromancer's circlet and other things.  In a similar fashion, Tanks would be using Surge to set additional blocks against monsters that attack more than once a round - or using it to get the occasional, rare, hit in with their slow weapon.

Finally, the depth of your survivor's survival pool matters, a survivor with Abyssal Sadist and 10 survival can spam their survival actions far more than one who has 1-2 survival left and no way of getting more. As your survival pool drains and becomes lower and lower, you should be using survival to either stay alive, or end the fight as soon as possible. 

So hopefully this provides a bit of help on a nebulous topic. I can address specific circumstances in the comments if people have questions!